Wrong way

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I often wake up at 4:30 because I think that’s when my upstairs neighbour gets up and though he is quiet, it often doesn’t take much to rouse me. Normally I fall back to sleep but for some reason I decided to start thinking at 4:30am. Yeah, that’s when all the synapses are firing. Definitely some coherent thought processes at that time of morning.
Eventually I fell back to sleep, but needless to say I’m a bit bagged today. When I got to the bus stop I saw a woman that I see periodically who is always quite nice. Because my defenses were down and I didn’t have the strength to re-erect my reserved wall of apathy and disdain, I complimented her on her hair. We ended up having a twenty minute conversation. So my theory stands! People are nice. It’s good to talk to people you see often. I learned that she has a boyfriend that she met while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He lives in Switzerland and is, ironically, a bus driver.
Anyways, because my mind was still a little muddled and I was only half paying attention when I boarded the bus I was holding my bus ticket the wrong way. You know when, after doing something repeatedly for a great length of time, you anticipate a certain response? Because this was what I was anticipating: step onto the bus, smile at the driver and wish him good morning as I insert the ticket into the ticket reader while he smiles back at me and wishes me a good morning. Followed by trying to quickly make it to the back of the bus before the driver pulls away abruptly, increasing my odds of being bounced of poles like a ping pong ball.
Instead, this is what happened. I start to extend my arm to put the ticket into the reader and the driver says, “wrong way”. In my mind it took about three minutes for this whole sequence of events to unfold, though in reality it was probably about two seconds. The first thing that registered was that those were not the right words. He was supposed to say “good morning”. That took one minute to process. Then I had to mull over the phrase “wrong way”. What was the wrong way? Were we going the wrong way? Had I put my shirt on inside out? I pondered this for what seemed to be another minute. Then it dawned on me, as I stuck my ticket into the reader: I was inserting the ticket the wrong way. Yes. My mind was quite evidently wading through treacle to reach this pinnacle of realizations. Hi. I’m Duder and I graduated with distinction in December. I look back at the bus driver in what feels like slow motion and then he says some more words which I have to recycle over and over like a rosary in my mind as I try to attach meaning to them, he smiles and says, “you should know better!”. I smile back and laugh because that’s about all I’m capable of. Halfway down the bus I think of about three great comebacks, but it’ll have to wait. Until I go the wrong way on some other Friday morning. Yawn.
Good morning, all!